When you use a phrase as a refrain, or place it in a chorus section, you’re giving it the job of repeating itself.

Each echo needs to be worthwhile—otherwise you’re just serving us a line that we’ve already heard. If we as listeners don’t see a reason why we should be hearing a particular passage again and again, you risk convincing us that your song isn’t going anywhere.

Crafting refrains and choruses can be tricky and paradoxical: by definition a refrain must be the same, or at least familiar each time it comes around, and yet we also need to ensure that our audience doesn’t get bored with that repetition. So how does a songwriter create a sense of novelty with something the second, third, fourth time it’s repeated?

There are many ways to subtly or overtly vary a section, but you can also vary the listener’s perception of the refrain even when you’re rehashing it word-for-word and note-for-note. To do so, you must…

Create a sense of contrast in whatever happens between refrains.

Most songs don’t just repeat the refrain over and over from start to finish, right? They’re broken up with verses or other sections. Whatever comes before a chorus will change the listener’s angle of entry. Astronauts know all about the importance of angle–a few degrees could make the difference between landing safely in the ocean or burning up in the atmosphere.

Lead up to the refrain from a different angle every time and the refrain will sound different every time, even though it remains essentially unchanged.

One way to visualize it is to think about how the exact color of a patch of grass would look if the sky turned a light orange hue. The grass remains the same, but the context has changed and we hardly recognize the grass now, right?

Another example: the dim underside of your bed is a much different experience from the warm softness that you sleep in. It’s still your bed down there among the dust and the hard metal frame and the shoeboxes—but your experience of it has changed. Perspective totally changes how you think and feel about it.

The Big Picture Emerges

Notice too that every time you see the bed from a new angle, that snapshot is added to the stack of perceptions you have filed in your brain under “Bed”. In this way, your place of repose slowly becomes much more complex, interesting, even contradictory. It is both where we sleep in bliss and where monsters lurk.

Likewise you can guide a listener through a series of perspectives, and you can choose what is revealed and in what order.

Change the context leading up to each chorus, and you’re handing your listener another puzzle piece to interlock with what you’ve already given them. The picture changes and grows more interesting as we listen. Piece by piece, a story is told.

Some Questions to Ask Yourself While Troubleshooting

• What does verse one tell us? Verse two? Verse three?
• How does each one lead into the chorus?
• Is each distinct? Does a story unfold?
• Am I cramming too much into any particular section?
• Is the pace of the song too fast or too slow?

And other concerns, which I’ll tackle in the many articles to come. Thanks for reading!

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